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Home , Athanasius of Alexandria, Cyril of Alexandria

Cyril of 09:00 - 10:20 Tuesday, 20th August, 2019 Room 1 Presentation type Short Communications Matthew

515 Fundamental differences on Christological expressions of St Cyril and Severus of

GEORGIOS SISKOS University of Thessaloniki, Faculty of , School of Pastoral and Social Theology, THESSALONIKI, Greece

Abstract

Severus’ Christological expressions manifest a verbal affinity with those of Cyril, whereas their notional content shows a decisive departure from Cyril. Firstly, Cyril from the formula of reunion 433 onwards, explicitly accepted the antiochean division of scriptural sayings into the manhood and the of Christ, without necessarily supposing that this would lead to division of Christ. Severus considered the formula of reunion as Cyril’s condescension to prattling children and built a chain of argumentation as to why an attribution of scriptural sayings to divinity and humanity of Christ leads inevitably to the division of Christ. Secondly, Cyril’s concept of division of Christ’s natures in theory alone did not signify fictional fantasy, but a real distinction, which does not result to a real division. Severus’s fundamental axiom that for a thing to exist in reality it has to be self-subsistent, namely having a hypostasis of its own, lead him to consider Cyril’s distinction of divinity and humanity in theory alone as univocal with fictional fantasy of a mind imagining the existence of two hypostases and natures in Christ, which never exist as such in reality. Thirdly, Cyril used the expression two hypostases, two natures to describe Christ’s natures, because he never thought of them as necessarily self- subsistent, which inevitably leads to an actual division. Severus by furnishing self-subsistency as the only reality eliminated deliberately every verbal and notional duality in Christ. The paper will explore Severus’ gradual notional alteration of Cyril’s Christological expression. 719 Impassible Passion: Cyril’s Unitive at the Crossroads between Christian Tradition and Plotinus’ Psychology

Alexey Streltsov Institute of Philosophy and Law, Siberian Branch of the Russian Academy of Sciences, Novosibirsk, Russian Federation. Theological Seminary of Siberian Evangelical Lutheran , Novosibirsk, Russian Federation

Abstract

While ancient Greek philosophical theology firmly held to the notion of impassibility of , Christian thought had to accommodate it to the Nicene confession that the divine ‘suffered under Pontius Pilate.’

I suggest that the unitive Christology of , with its claim that the incarnate Word suffered impassibly, built on preceding theological tradition ( and being its most clear representatives), but at the same time represented conceptual reworking of the paradigm of psychology of Plotinus (continued in the works of , Iamblichus, and Proclus) with its understanding of the character of impassibility of the soul in its union with the body. According to Plotinus, Enn. III 6, the soul is engulfed by the passions without being really affected by them (at least in the way the ensouled body is). For Cyril this translated into remark of the Word ‘tasting death in the flesh’ in his notoriously contested 12th .

Consequently, I find it helpful neither downplaying rational component of the thought of Cyril (as if he only followed the Biblical narrative ignoring the paradoxical character of his claims), nor postulating his uncritical dependency on non-Christian philosophical theology. Compared to his Antiochene critics (, Theodoritus, later representatives of ) who remained to a great extent within a framework of Platonic philosophical theology concerning the concept of divine impassibility, Cyril built a bridge toward more Incarnational view by interweaving points of Neoplatonic psychology within his Christological discourse.